Is there a PHP function to pull out the string between two characters?

Question

Is there a PHP function that grabs the string in between two characters. For example, I want to know what is between the percent and dollar symbol:

%HERE$

What is the function for this?

Answer 1

You could do that with a regex :

$string = 'test%HERE$glop';

$m = array();
if (preg_match('/%(.*?)\$/', $string, $m)) {
  var_dump($m[1]);
}

Will get you :

string 'HERE' (length=4)

Couple of notes :

• The $ in the pattern has the be escaped, as it has a special meaning (end of string)
• You want to match everything : .*
  • that's between % and $
  • But in non-gready mode : .*?
• And you want that captured -- hence the () arround it.

Answer 2

You can use a regular expression to get that:

preg_match('/%([^$]*)\\$/', $str, $match)

If a match was found, $match[0] will contain the whole match and $match[1] the text between % and $.

But you can also use basic string functions like strpos and search for the % and the first $ after that:

if (($start = strpos($str, '%')) !== false && ($end = strpos($str, '$', $start)) !== false) {
    $match = substr($str, $start, $end-$start);
}